I recently loaded up my faithful 80GB playstation for my usual nightime ritual of watching Blue Mountain State on netflix, when the screen froze and quickly shut off. Shortly after, the red light started blinking slowly. After searching through forum after forum and trying all of their suggestions, I'm a little nervous to start it back up again. I really just wanna back up all my info in case the PS3 is for sure dead and gone. I have a 250GB external hard drive that I can throw all my memory on. Now before I do this I was wondering if its possible to save my hard drive from my ps3 and put it into a new one? Also, when backing up my info, will the playstation recognize the external hard drive? and how do I copy all the memory over to the the hard drive from the ps3? Sorry for the big chunk of text.

TL;DR, 6 year old PS3 YLODed and I would appreciate help on what I can do to save my game files.

Edit: Thanks for the responses guys. Ill be sure to try what I can. Not too sure about the soldering but I'm sure I can find someone who is comfortable with it.

My original 60GB PS3 gets the YLOD problem every few months.
Usually starts off with it shutting down after an hour or so of usage,
and then getting to the point where it will shut off as soon as it's powered on.

If your lucky, you might be able to turn the PS3 on and keep it cool with a desk fan and run a system backup to your external HDD.

If you can't get that far, time to open the PS3 up and get out the heat gun !

I highly recommend you sell the old fat PS3 on craigslist for 200 before it dies. You could get about 200. Then get a new 250 GB bundle for 299 and maybe uncharted. Sell the new game unopened for 25-30 and you would have only spent 70-75 plus tax! Well worth the investment. I wish I had this advice when my PS3 ylod.

Thanks, but I'm covered. My brother has a fat PS3 that is a bit younger, but he doesn't use it much so I could fall back on that one. We also have a slim PS3. So yeah, I kinda live in a PlayStation household.

The external HDD needs to be FAT32 format or the PS3 won't recognize it. The actual backup process. I've been emailing them back and forth for a few days trying to solve an issue I'm having with mine. Good luck!

This worked for me. It happened randomly to mine and I just scoured the internet for an hour or so until this. Sorry for the bad quality of the video, but he sums it up well. Unless you are good at taking apart and putting together, this may be your go to video. If you want to find a better quality video go for it.

It is a temporary fix, but if you're only interested in getting it back and running, this should work. I don't know about backing up. From what I have heard you can't, but that doesn't mean I'm right. If you are comfortable with soldering and taking apart, then there are many other fixes, but you void your warrantee if you even have one (obviously), Sony won't offer to fix it since it is hardware and they should, and you risk losing everything.

TL;DR. Watch this video. Its a temporary fix to be able to at least get it to play again, and possibly pull info off as a backup if you actually can.

I had the same thing happen. I sent my PS3 off to GohperMods.com and for roughly the price of a game, they reflowed the solder which allowed the system to get up and running long enough for me to do a complete transfer to a new PS3. If your game saves are that important, consider going this route.

I used Gophermods recently too and it was totally painless. Sent out my PS3 on a Monday and had it back Wednesday of the following week. They give you a six month warranty and then if your console fails after 6 months they still fix it free, but you pay for shipping it to Minnesota and back.